What To Read

Tertulia's First Dibs Editors Salon series is an exclusive look at a few of the most exciting books coming out each season. Join us on January 15 at 7 pm on Zoom for what promises to be a great conversation about books by the editors who helped to shape and publish them.

➳ January 15 at 7:00 pm ET on Zoom Get tickets to the First Dibs Editors Salon

Are you an active Tertulia member? If so, use the special promo code in your email to reserve FREE tickets including the opportunity to request an advance copy of one of the featured books. Have a question or need help registering? Contact us at hello@tertulia.com.

One of our winter salon selections is Unshrunk by Laura Delano, a powerful memoir of one woman's experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medications, and her journey to discover herself outside the mental health industry. We are honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Allison Lorentzen, join us at the salon on January 15 to talk about the book. She shared this personal note as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

Allison Lorentzen is an executive editor at Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

When Laura Delano was fourteen years old, her parents took her to see her first psychiatrist. That fateful meeting would be the beginning of her thirteen-year journey through the mental health system during which Delano would be prescribed nineteen different psychiatric drugs and eventually deemed ‘treatment resistant,’ resigned to a life where she was told her various diagnoses—bipolar disorder, borderline personality, and more—would never improve.

Unshrunk is Laura Delano’s harrowing, vulnerable, and fearless account of her years as a psychiatric patient and her ultimate decision to leave it all behind to build a life outside the confines of diagnoses and drugs. With access to her medical records, Delano brilliantly weaves the impressions of those who cared for her with her own memories, offering a deep, complicated, and sensitive account of a young woman’s life and all the pain and confusion that this period held for her.

Now a leader in rethinking our relationship to psychiatric drugs and mental health diagnoses, Delano has challenged and inspired me to question and rethink so much about suffering and humanity through her extraordinary story. I hope Unshrunk will resonate with anyone whose life has been touched by these issues.